![]() Typically, this policy’s success has been judged by the increase in minority degree recipients, but this metric is largely deceptive. Surging members of disenfranchised groups into colleges and universities will, first, cultivate competitive skill sets within individuals who have had an inequitable access to resources and, second, will also benefit these communities when degree recipients bring their skills back into disenfranchised areas. ![]() ![]() The central tenet of affirmative action advocates is two fold. Margaret Thatcher once said that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and the madame prime minister was right: dismantling systemic bias against minority communities should be a universal ethic, but the success of race-based affirmative action has fallen short of this goal. But however inspired this policy might have been, affirmative action is the patient zero for this government’s political and policy failures to combat inequality. In its inception, affirmative action sought out to balance educational outcomes between minority groups and the white majority, arguing that it was ultimately America’s deep institutional biases and refusal to embrace integration that propagated two centuries of inequality. And in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson took a step towards realizing this dream that would both inspire and divide generations to come: he mandated that educational institutions embrace affirmative action to repudiate the discriminatory norms of the past. King, when America boldly established that its original promise would live up to the meaning of its creed, that equality under the law must be the privilege of all Americans, this country began on a path of reimagined possibility for the victims of its oppressive past.
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